David Prager Branner 林德威

Associate Professor and Chinese Program Coordinator,
University of Maryland

Research interests

• Historical linguistics of Chinese
  • Early Chinese writing
  • Chinese historical phonology in the service of literature
  • Intellectual history of Chinese linguistics
• Chinese lexicography
  • Living Mandarin usage based on fieldwork
  • Dialect fieldwork, documentation, classification, and ID
  • Native dictionaries in early and medieval China
• The Yánshì jiāxùn 顏氏家訓, a sixth century book that insists on a central place for language in the educated household.

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I am a traditional sinologist — a student of pre-modern Chinese language, literature, and culture, with particular emphasis on philology and the language of traditional society. Although my research extends well into the field of Linguistics, I think of myself as a sinologist with an interest in language rather than a linguist with an interest in Chinese. I was originally trained as a dialect fieldworker, but increasingly work in standard Mandarin and books (including received and excavated materials).

My present long-term research question is whether it is possible to demonstrate that writing originated natively in China in the pre-documented era. I am especially interested in what we can learn about literacy in early China (“early” meaning up to the end of the Hàn dynasty, which ended in C.E. 220). I am also an inveterate collector of words, and am involved in several on-going dictionary projects.

If there is any one thing that has characterized my whole academic career, it is persistently trying to engage scholars outside of my own specialization — in sinology and in more distant areas of academia. I see myself as a specialist with borderless interests. My goal as a scholar is to make the powerful technical tools of my discipline available to people in other fields and to be free to take part in a kind of long-term cross-pollination, so difficult to achieve within the restrictive administrative structures that now seem to form spontaneously in universities.